What's In A Name

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Of course,” the old man replied.

  “Good night, then,” Altman said.

  With that, he started to move on down the aisle, but in a movement far quicker than Altman would have expected from such a pale and sickly old gentleman, the man again grabbed his hand.

  “We both still have our German accents, Ziggy,” he said.

  “Time cannot obliterate everything,” Altman told him as he gently pulled his hand free.

  “And never the things of youth,” the old man agreed. “The things that made us. Particularly our crimes, yes?”

  “Our crimes?” Altman asked, then added, “Yes, I suppose so.”

  The man suddenly appeared embarrassed. “Forgive me for troubling you, Zig…” he stopped, straightened himself like a low ranking soldier before an officer, then said, “Herr Altman.”

  “No trouble at all,” Altman said, then moved on down the aisle, empty seats on both sides. At the end of it, and for a reason he could not fathom, he stopped and turned back toward the front of the room, where the old man now sat, facing forward, peering at the lectern, his shoulders drooping beneath a jacket that was not only threadbare, as Altman had previously observed, but perhaps a size too big, something purchased at a thrift store, no doubt, so that he abruptly felt a seizure of pity for this old fellow, so lonely, as it seemed, at the end of an unfortunate life. Might he have known some modest glory, Altman asked himself, had history turned his way? Might he have loved beautiful women, had accomplished children, felt the reverence of the few, if not the adulation of the multitude?

  He glanced at the clock that hung on the opposite wall and suddenly considered the passage of his own life. He was a widower, with children in distant cities, a man with a solitary evening before him. Normally he would have gone back to his apartment to work on his catalogue, a large collection of books and manuscripts written after the Great War, the works of those who’d known the fire and thunder of battle, along with the great unrest that had followed the Peace of Versailles, some of which he’d cited this very night during his talk on Carlyle. As a way of spending the remainder of his evening, he did not find this in the least off-putting. Still, would it be so bad to indulge this other old man, this compatriot—though admittedly at a distance—of those ancient, sanguinary fields, for a little while, perhaps find a way to suggest to the poor fellow that he was not so lacking in distinction as he so clearly thought himself? Earlier, he’d had a vaguely unsettling sense that the old man was accusing him of something, but none of that remained. Now all he felt was pity.

  “Have you had dinner?” he blurted with a suddenness that surprised him.

  The old man had resumed his seat, his head deeply bowed. He did not move or in any other way respond to Altman’s questions. Could it be that this unfortunate old gentleman had simply been unable to imagine himself being asked to dinner by the distinguished “Herr Altman? If so, how very, very sad, Altman thought.

  And so he strode back to where the old man sat, his hands folded over his lap as if in stern guardianship of the package in his lap. A rectangular package, as Altman observed, wrapped in cheap brown paper and tied with a string.

  A manuscript!

  Ah, so that was what had brought this unfortunate man out into the rain, Altman thought, he has a manuscript he no doubt thinks valuable. It would have no value at all, of course. As a collector, he’d been approached untold times by people clutching books and manuscripts they felt valuable, then untied this same gray string and drawn back this same brown paper only to find… a tattered, forty-year-old edition of Doctor Faustus, or the nearest thing imaginable to a book club edition of Heinrich Heine. And yet these poor, ignorant souls had held on to their “precious” treasures either lovingly or avariciously. It was often hard to tell which.

  But not now, not with this fellow. It was clear that in his case, it was love. Altman could see it in the gentle way his gnarled fingers curled around the corners of the manuscript, his index fingers moving softly back and forth, as if he were comforting an infant. In fact, he had never seen anyone touch a book with such tenderness. It was as if, through his fingers, the old man were singing it a lullaby.

  “Excuse me?” Altman said softly.

  The old man looked up.

  “I was thinking we might have dinner together,” Altman said.

  “Dinner… together?”

  “Yes,” Altman said. “I’ve a favorite place a few blocks from here. They make a wonderful chicken salad sandwich.”

  The old man peered at him hesitantly. “I am a pensioner,” he reminded him.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Altman said expansively. “Dinner will be on me. Think of it as payment for the effort you made in coming out into the rain, coming to a bookstore and sitting through my poor remarks.”

  “Oh, no,” the old man protested. “I found your remarks quite persuasive.”

  “Please, let’s have dinner,” Altman said cheerfully, then added an unexpectedly poignant truth, “Sometimes I grow tired of eating alone.”

  “I wouldn’t want to impose upon your time,” the old man said hesitantly.

  “Oh, no, not at all,” Altman said.

  “Well, if you’re sure,” the old man said, then pressed the package to his chest and began to rise. “If you’re sure I’m not imposing.”

  “Not at all, I assure you.”

  Altman saw that the poor fellow was having trouble getting to his feet, and so he reached over and tucked his hand under his shoulder.

  “Easy does it,” he said with a quick laugh. “Old bones are not easily commanded, are they?” He reached for the package, thinking that it might be easier for the old man to get to his feet without it, but rather than release it, he clung to it all the more tightly.

  “It’s all right,” the old man said, “I’m used to carrying it.”

  “Really?” Altman asked. “You carry it everywhere?”

  “It is the only thing I ever… created,” the old man said.

  Ah, so I was right, Altman thought, it was a lullaby.

  Altman watched as the man drew on the black raincoat he’d earlier hung over the back of his chair. It was frayed at the sleeves and worn in the shoulders, proof once again that the poor fellow was of little means, so that Altman suddenly felt quite proud of himself for asking this old schoolmate to dinner, whoever he was. They were different certainly, he thought, and yet they’d both fled the ravages of postwar Germany, then helplessly watched as misfortune after misfortune had fallen upon their native land.

  “To the right,” he said to one who now seemed truly his fellow countryman, “the restaurant is only a couple of blocks away.”

  The rain had briefly fallen during Altman’s talk, and the sidewalk was still wet and slippery. As they walked, Altman noticed that the old man had a slight limp.

  “From the war?” he asked.

  “No,” the old man answered. “My job. My legs were broken on my job.”

  “Where did you work?”

  “The shipyards,” the old man answered. “The Brooklyn shipyards.”

  “What was your job?”

  “I loaded cargo.”

  “And something fell on you?” Altman asked.

  “A big crate,” the old man said. “Of guns. It was marked ‘Steel Rods,’ but the crate was full of guns. Hundreds of guns. Cartons of ammunition, too.”

  “Going where?”

  “Palestine.”

  “Ah, yes,” Altman said. “So much trouble there.”

  They reached the corner, where they were stopped by the traffic signal.

  “I told the shipyard master,” the old man continued, “and some people came and they took the guns away.” He shrugged. “I’m sure they just sent them in another crate.”

  “Have you found other guns?”

  The old man looked up and smiled softly. “They are always going there,” he added. “To the Jews.”

  Altman nodded. He was well versed in the region’s cu
rrent troubles. After all, they’d been going on for over fifty years, and there was no solution in sight. Each year brought more conflict, a struggle that he suspected would never find resolution.

  The light turned and the two of them moved forward, Altman at a pace far slower that he would normally have taken, the man limping along beside him. He could not imagine living such a life, and this made it all the more important for him to give this poor chap a decent dinner and some kindly conversation.

  They reached the restaurant a few minutes later. Everyone knew Altman and made a great fuss over him, something that clearly impressed the old man.

  “I’m a regular,” Altman explained demurely.

  “It’s nice to be noticed,” the old man said.

  To live so unheralded a life seemed infinitely sad to Altman, never to be appreciated, never to be spoken to with respect or honored in any way. There is a sorrow in smallness, he decided, a pain that goes with being just another bit of microscopic plankton in a sea of green. He knew better than to give any hint of his pity, however, and so he cheerfully opened the menu though he, as well as the entire staff, knew exactly what he’d order.

  Once he’d ordered it, he handed the waiter the menu.

  “And what about you?” he said to his guest.

  The enormous menu lowered to reveal a face veiled in perplexity.

  “I don’t know,” the old man said, then looked again, and after a moment ordered what Altman recognized was the single cheapest item available.

  “Only a split pea soup?” he asked. “That’s all you want?”

  The old man nodded.

  “All right, then,” Altman said to the waiter, “A split pea soup for my good friend here.”

  When the soup came it was clear to Altman that the old fellow was hungry. Perhaps he should have guessed as much from the slightness of his frame, the loose hang of his skin. He had seen hunger before and so he found it odd, and perhaps even a bit disturbing, that the plenty of his years in America had caused him to forget the ghostly look of it, the sallow cheeks, the hollow eyes, the way the old man couldn’t keep from taking two bites at a time of the bread that came with the soup, quickly wiping his mouth, then taking two more. Fressen was the German word for it: to eat like an animal.

  “You were right,” the old man said. “The food here is good.”

  Altman nodded. “They have great wiener schnitzel, too,” he said, “and I sometimes have a Reuben sandwich. My doctor tells me that I shouldn’t have pastrami, but I like it, and at a certain age, what’s the point of being strict with oneself? We all end up dead in the end, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, we all end up dead,” the old man agreed. He sipped from his spoon, a loud slurp after which he seemed to see himself in Altman’s eyes, see himself as hungry, and because of his hunger, pathetic. Slowly, he returned the spoon to the bowl and with a slow, sad movement, drew an errant wave of white hair back and away from his forehead. “We all end up dead in the end, yes,” he repeated, “and after that, we cannot make amends.”

  “Amends for what?” Altman asked.

  “As I said before, for our crimes,” the old man answered.

  Altman glanced at the package that now rested beside him in the booth they’d taken by the window and wondered if it was confessional. There had been such want after the Great War that he’d heard tales of murder, even of cannibalism. Could it be that this poor soul had…?

  No, Altman told himself, you are being melodramatic. Still, the very presence of the man’s manuscript worked like a question mark in his soul, a door he could not stop himself from cautiously prying open.

  “It’s a manuscript, isn’t it?” he asked with a nod toward the package.

  The old man nodded.

  “Is it… about you?”

  The old man nodded again, clearly disinclined to discuss it further, so that Altman decided to go in a different direction.

  “It was hard to make your way after the war, yes?” he asked.

  “Very hard,” the old man said. He looked at Altman with a curious passion, one laced with what seemed a host of old angers. “It was terrible, what was done to us.”

  “Yes, terrible,” Altman said. “Truly terrible. We were treated as monsters, a people who could commit any atrocity. They had made up these stories of the Hun. The British mostly, but the Americans, too. And the French. Terrible, terrible lies.”

  “All of them lies,” the old man said in a kind of snarl that both surprised and alarmed Altman with its barely contained fury. “The land of Beethoven. The land of Goethe.” He seemed overwhelmed with ire. “Killing babies. That’s what they said in their lies. Killing women and old people. That is what they said we did.”

  “Exactly,” Altman said. “Things no civilized people would do.”

  The old man looked away, his attention once again drawn to the world beyond the window. He seemed to be working very hard not to explode. Then, after a moment, his gaze drifted back to Altman. “Your uncle was an English teacher,” he said. “At the Realschule. I was in his class.”

  “Really?”

  “He was a very good teacher,” the old man said.

  Altman sat back slightly. “I’m quite sorry to say so, but I still can’t quite recall you from those days.”

  “You were younger,” the old man said. “I had to leave the Realschule the same year that you came to it.”

  “So, we were never actually classmates?”

  The old man shook his head. “My name would mean nothing to you,” he said. “I saw you at school. That is all. In the playground or the hallway. Sometimes walking with your uncle.” His smile was thin, but not without warmth. “I admired you. Everyone said you were very smart. In math. In English.” With a trembling hand he reached for the spoon, then drew back, as if afraid of humiliating himself again. “In everything.” He glanced again toward the window, lingered a moment, then returned his attention to Altman. “I am seventy-nine,” he said.

  “I’m seventy-five,” Altman said. “But there really isn’t much difference at our age, is there? We’re just two old men, you and I.”

  The old man smiled but something in his eyes remained mirthless, so that he seemed to drift in a sea of bad memories, perhaps nightmarish ones. He had no doubt sought refuge in America as so many had done through the decades, Altman thought. But clearly, he’d found something considerably less than the Promised Land. Life was unfair, that was the long and the short of it, Altman decided. He remembered a Latin phrase his father had taught him, something written by Horace: Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur: You need but change the name and this story is about you. How true, he thought now as he briefly recalled his own journey out of the whirlwind.

  The old man seemed almost to read Altman’s thoughts, or at least divine the direction of them.

  “I could not make my way after the war,” he said. “It was chaos, and everywhere a new trouble. I am sure you recall those times.”

  “Vividly, I’m afraid.”

  The old man’s eyes grew cold. “It is dangerous to humiliate a people. A people can be like a cornered animal.”

  Altman nodded. “That is true. And so they look for a hero, which is what I was speaking about tonight. A great leader. But a hero can’t change the history of a nation.”

  The old man nodded. “We were looking for such a person,” he said. “It is true that we were looking. But you are right as you said in your talk. It would not have mattered. It is the great forces that matter, not one person.” He smiled.

  “So smart, Herr Altman, to know such things.”

  Altman tried not to react to such flattery.

  “I’m not a Marxist,” he said, “but Marx was right about one thing. It is great forces that determine great events. A man is carried on the stream of history. He cannot direct that stream or change its course.”

  “This is true,” the old man said. He smiled, but it was a dark smile, laced with something that seemed to teeter on the edge of bi
tterness. “As a young man, I had great hopes for myself,” he said in the sad tone of a small, insignificant man admitting to having once had some great dream for himself.

  It was a tone that touched Altman’s heart with such force that he reached out and patted the old man’s hand.

  “Of course,” he said. “We all have such hopes in our youth.”

  “But from your talk I have learned that nothing—not a man or a book or anything else—can change history,” the old man said. “Little things change little things, that is all. Like those Bavarian boys. Someone whispered into someone’s ear, or maybe sent a cable, and it was over for them.” He looked at Altman tensely. “They were small, and a small thing took them away.”

  Altman again felt uncomfortably in the old man’s sites.

  “And a bully at school can only change the one he bullies,” the old man added.

  “History is nothing but the accumulation of such things,” Altman said with complete confidence. “It is made by millions of small actions by small people who are themselves responding to great forces.”

  The old man was clearly not inclined to dispute the point with which he’d already expressed agreement, and so, as a matter of simple politeness, Altman changed the subject.

  “So, after you left the Realschule in Linz, what did you do?” he asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Nothing until I got older. And then I only changed my name.”

  Altman was relieved that the old man had now drawn his fingers away from the package and seemed quite abruptly to be a different track entirely. “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  “Because I hated my father,” the old man answered. “I had always hated him, but I was like other boys, I felt I should respect him, obey him. You know how we Germans are. We obey. It is what we do best.”

  “So it must have been hard for you, changing your name,” Altman said. “I mean, to be so disrespectful of one’s father.”

  “Very hard,” the old man said. “It is not easy to deny your father, even when your father is a cruel man.”

  “So, you took a different name?” Altman asked.

  “Yes,” the old man said. “I took my grandmother’s name. She was very kind, very warm. I wanted the name of someone kind and warm.” He seemed to drift back to that distant time. “I wanted this name to comfort me because things had not gone well for me. I had no home. Living on scraps. Living in rags. It is terrible not to know when you will eat again, when you will wash again. It is terrible and you can go mad. Perhaps I went a little mad.”